Friday, July 23, 2021

Call for Judgment: It isn’t just exits that get blocked

Fewer than a quorum not voting against. Failed 1-5 by Kevan.

Adminned at 24 Jul 2021 16:22:08 UTC

Fail the proposals “🎉BLOOD FRENZY🎉”, “Daywalkers”, “All Charged Up”, and “All In”.

For “Simply Slithering” and each newer proposal, if an admin has attempted to enact or fail it, uphold that enactment/failure if it was illegal purely due to the proposal not being the oldest pending proposal at the time it was enacted/failed (and was otherwise legal).

In the rule “Effects”, add a full stop to the end of the definitions of “The north exit is blocked”, “The east exit is blocked”, “The west exit is blocked”, and “The south exit is blocked” effects.

So, the party-popper blood frenzy proposal was never legally Enacted or Failed, and thus is still Pending. (In order to fail a proposal, you have to mark it as failed, something which Brendan didn’t do while attempting to fail it, so the “fail a proposal” admin action was never properly completed.)

This has a knock-on effect for the rest of the proposal queue, meaning that future proposals can’t be enacted or failed either until we unblock the queue somehow. So here’s a CFJ to unblock it.

(BlogNomic really needs some sort of rule that allows innocent mistakes in queue order to not hold up the game. Something like “admins can enact proposals out of order if no previous proposal has its status in the ExpressionEngine software as Pending, but doing so knowingly is a Fair Play violation”.)

I included a random typo fix just to make sure that this CFJ doesn’t fall afoul of “It specifies neither changes to the Gamestate or Ruleset nor corrections to any gamestate-tracking entities.” – it’s unclear to me whether changes to proposal status are enough to avoid that clause, so the typo fix is an additional side effect to make it clear that the CFJ isn’t intended to be immediately failable.

Comments

Brendan: he/him

23-07-2021 16:41:37 UTC

for

Josh: he/they

23-07-2021 16:46:34 UTC

I’m not sure that this is necessary.

From Enacting and Failing:
“Whenever an Admin Resolves a Votable Matter, they should mark their name, and are highly encouraged to report the final tally of Votes (or the fact that it was self-killed or vetoed). Comments cannot be made on Enacted or Failed Votable Matters.”

From Proposals:
“The oldest Pending Proposal may be Enacted by any Admin (by updating the Ruleset and/or Gamestate to include the specified effects of that Proposal, and then setting that Proposal’s status to Enacted)”
So it would be problem if it was a proposal that was enacted.

But the language isn’t replicated for failures:
“The oldest Pending Proposal may be Failed by any Admin, if any of the following are true:”

So I can’t see where it says that failed proposals have to be marked failed at all.

I think that the mark can just be corrected on the basis on inaccurate portrayal of gamestate.

Soft against on the basis of no problem that requires remedy.

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 16:47:11 UTC

against because I don’t trust AIS not to have a scam hidden here, and because the CfJ is unnecessary. The proposal was failed. There is nothing in the rules that requires it to be properly marked with the failed tag as part of the failing process.

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 16:48:15 UTC

not to mention, if we establish that AIS is right here (which passing this would) it would make my most recent proposal illegal due to the three pending proposals rule.

Josh: he/they

23-07-2021 16:51:02 UTC

Good point Clucky - it would also make any pending proposal by me illegal on the basis of three pending.

Brendan: he/him

23-07-2021 16:53:38 UTC

against CoV per the above. I’m going to go ahead and mark the proposal as failed now on the basis of Josh’s point.

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 16:54:05 UTC

lol I already marked it as failed Bredan too slow

ais523:

23-07-2021 17:10:37 UTC

Could someone clarify what specific action by an admin causes them to be taking the “fail a proposal” action, if it isn’t setting the status field to Failed? I can’t think of anything else we could look at to say “the admin is failing this proposal”; the marking of the name and the vote tally are, legally, things that you do after the proposal has already been failed.

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 17:15:01 UTC

> the marking of the name and the vote tally are, legally, things that you do after the proposal has already been failed.

yup. which means that marking the proposal as failed isn’t actually what fails the proposal, as that gets done at the same time as the other things.

instead the admin just waves their hand and fails the proposal. and then goes and marks it as failed.

Josh: he/they

23-07-2021 17:23:48 UTC

That bit of the ruleset is very a legacy of the blogspot era

ais523:

23-07-2021 17:40:04 UTC

During the First Dynasty of Diabecko, there was a rule enacted with an intentional loophole that caused proposal, CFJ and DoV statuses to become variables tracked on a wiki page.

The Gamestate Tracking rule at the time was very similar to now (actions that update information tracked on a wiki page are performed by editing that wiki page).

As soon as that rule was enacted, there was then a defined process for enacting/failing proposals, CFJs and DoVs: you would need to edit that page to say that the proposal was enacted or failed. We haven’t been doing that, so no proposals, CFJs or DoVs have passed since then, and we’re still in the First Dynasty of Diabecko. (A side effect of that is that the auto-uphold that happens upon a DoV won’t have fixed things for us.)

We can probably fix this with a CFJ to uphold everything (or more reliably, just set the ruleset and gamestate to match what we think it is). We should probably add a defined process for proposal/CFJ/DoV enactment at the same time; it could be as simple as saying “the Failed/Enacted/Pending status of a Votable Matter is tracked using its status field on the blog, with ‘Illegal’ being another representation of ‘Failed’”.

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 18:05:51 UTC

who cares how the rules worked back in another dynasty? that isn’t how they work now.

ais523:

23-07-2021 18:52:30 UTC

If proposal status really were an untracked variable, like most of the people here are arguing, it would be how they work now.

Cuddlebeam, on Slack, has mentioned that we have a core rule “Votable Matters and other official posts, as well as specific gamestate information, shall be tracked by the BlogNomic blog at http://blognomic.com.”. That seems to imply that the blog is used to track the pending/enacted/failed status of proposals, thus it isn’t actually an untracked variable after all. That means that if this CFJ is voted down, the queue will be blocked until it is unblocked by some other means (e.g. by reverting the failure of, and then failing, every proposal in order since the one that broke).

Clucky: he/him

23-07-2021 19:06:50 UTC

well the comments on the proposal properly marked it as failed. there was just an error in the representation of the gamestate which got correctly.

Raven1207: he/they

23-07-2021 21:25:41 UTC

against

lemon: she/her

24-07-2021 06:58:39 UTC

against